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Wales man falls victim to phone scam

Recently, there’s been a rash of plots from scammers who look past the internet and gadgets to a more traditional channel - phones. A man from Wales recently lost money in a scheme in which people posing as Microsoft employees call potential victims and tell them of computer viruses affecting their systems, the Denbighshire Free Press reported..

The woman who called Bryn Jones directed him through a series of searches that brought up results she said showed a number of viruses. For a fee paid by credit card, she said, Microsoft would remove the viruses. But the truth was, Jones had no viruses and the woman didn't work for Microsoft.

An employee from a Denbighshire Microsoft contractor, Catalyst Systems, advised people that Microsoft wouldn’t use the phone to contact customers about problems. “These people are clearly targeting vulnerable people who wouldn’t know any different,” Rory McGough said.

A similar trend in New Zealand has netted about $10 million New Zealand from 30 percent of the country’s population, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs reported recently. Skype also has been used as a recent channel for similar attacks, in which scams claim that users’ computers are infected and link them to malicious sites.